Urban Flotsam: Stirring the City

The manner in which global trends affect cities and increase instability is like letting a rising river loose on a house. Global trends create urban flotsam that forms a second skin of the earth. How is this visible and how can it be useful in urban planning? This book answers questions through examples. It contains a manifesto for a general debate of issues, a poetic setting of the theme of the second skin and case studies undertaken in urban situations. With splendid photographs and magnificent conceptual maps and diagrams, the book balances between urban theory, urban pedagogy and urban poetry.

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Page 129 - His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with 'whatever is at hand', that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project...

Page 129 - bricoleur's" means cannot therefore be defined in terms of a project (which would presuppose besides, that, as in the case of the engineer, there were, at least in theory, as many sets of tools and materials or "instrumental sets," as there are different kinds of projects). It is to be defined only by its potential use or, putting this another way and in the language of the "bricoleur" himself, because the elements are collected or retained on the principle that "they may always come in handy.

Page 250 - Chinese encyclopedia' in which it is written that 'animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

Page 129 - ... whatever is at hand', that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.

Page 129 - bricoleur' is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks ; but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with 'whatever is at hand...

Page 75 - The networks of these moving. intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator. shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations. it remains daily and indefinitely other.

Page 75 - They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning.

Page 273 - In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a 'metaphor' — a bus or a train. Stories could also take this noble name: every day, they traverse and organize places: they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories slightly . . . Narrative structures have the status of spatial syntaxes.

Page 59 - In the complex system, when we look for a cause near in time and space to a symptom, we usually find what appears to be a plausible cause. But it is usually not the cause. The complex system presents apparent causes that are in fact coincident symptoms. The high degree of time correlation between variables in complex systems can lead us to make cause-and-effect associations between variables that are simply moving together as part of the total dynamic behavior of the system. Conditioned by our...

Page 273 - IN MODERN ATHENs, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a "metaphor" — a bus or a train. Stories could also take this noble name: every day, they traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories.